Panoramic photographs are wide images, with field of view greater than that of a human eye. They model the world around an observer as being projected on a cylindrical screen. These images are not designed to be viewed as whole in one glance, but rather as if through a window of limited width. Special software is required to render a view of the panoramic image, to unwarp it, using reverse cylinder transform. An immersive user experience can not be achieved with a single static view, as the panorama must be live, smoothly responding to change of the view direction.
Conventional methods do not resolve the problem of preview of a panoramic image, to allow the end-user decide if he wants to get immersed into specific panorama. With hard copy (print) there is a workaround—that is, to display the warped image as a whole. However, such approach is acceptable on large screen, but is not relevant for small screens, such as used in mobile devices, because for a wide panorama only a small portion of the screen can be used. This problem can be appreciated by comparing FIGS. 1 and 2. These and other background topics are discussed, for instance, in Panoramic vision: sensors, theory, and applications, by Ryad Benosman, Sing Bing Kang, Olivier Faugeras. Contributor Olivier Faugeras, Springer, 2001, ISBN 0387951113, 9780387951119.